[Talk-ca] State of OSM maps in Calgary - comparison with Germany

[John Whelan]

I suggest you either use data from the Federal Government or Stats 
Canada open data portals or double check the license.  I assume you know 
the process for an import? If not someone can point you in the right 
direction.

Cheerio John

Stephen Bosch wrote on 7/4/2023 7:15 PM:
> Hi Justin, thanks for this.
>
> Maybe the best thing for me to do is to try to do an import of one 
> (gotta start small) of these problematic neighbourhoods in Calgary, 
> perhaps with the help of your tool, just to learn what's involved 
> (I've never contributed to OSM before).
>
> Stephen
>
> Am 04.07.23 um 23:40 schrieb Justin Tracey:
>> It's a combination of licensing issues and the difficulty of getting 
>> consensus for imports.
>>
>> The former is a problem of each source of data (municipality, city, 
>> province, quango) typically deciding their lawyers have to make minor 
>> tweaks to the wording, which means it's no longer the same license as 
>> any of the approved ones, so must go through the whole LWG approval 
>> process again. The easiest way to work around this in most cases is 
>> getting explicit written consent from the source for use with OSM. See:
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Getting_permission
>>
>> The latter is a problem of buy-in from the community. Large-scale 
>> building imports have been discussed numerous times, with varying 
>> degrees of success (e.g., Toronto's building import seems to be 
>> complete). The most recent of these discussions is, I believe, this 
>> one, which has been silent for a few years now:
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada_-_The_Open_Database_of_Buildings 
>>
>>
>> Since then, there has been an address data export from the government 
>> of Canada under an approved license, but I don't believe anyone has 
>> proposed a full data import. The closest I know of is this tool I 
>> made to use the data as a source, not as an automated import (it's 
>> currently targeted at Waterloo Region, but I designed it to be easy 
>> to reuse anywhere covered in the StatCan data):
>> https://github.com/jtracey/WaterlooRegionAddresses
>>
>>   - Justin
>>
>> On 2023-07-04 17:13, Stephen Bosch wrote:
>>> Hi everybody, bonjour -
>>>
>>> I live in Germany and I use OSM on a daily basis for address 
>>> look-ups and navigation. I've got the OSM+ app on my phone and it 
>>> works very well. In fact, the OSM maps are often better than Google 
>>> Maps.
>>>
>>> When I'm back in Canada (Calgary, mostly), it is practically 
>>> unusable. The most obvious weakness is that buildings are often 
>>> unnumbered or missing entirely, so simple address look-ups fail. For 
>>> a dramatic example of this, have a look at the Capitol Hill 
>>> neighbourhood in Calgary:
>>>
>>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/106980291#map=17/51.07172/-114.10028
>>>
>>> While it's true that there is a large community of contributors in 
>>> Germany, the main reason the OSM maps are so good there is that 
>>> states and municipalities share rich geodata freely, with some even 
>>> actively contributing to OSM. Many public services rely on OSM data, 
>>> so it's in their interest that it be of high quality.
>>>
>>> The City of Calgary seems to have an open data policy:
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m32hxV8md4c
>>>
>>> https://www.calgary.ca/service-lines/2023-2026-city-services/data-analytics-information-access.html 
>>>
>>>
>>> https://data.calgary.ca/
>>>
>>> so I would expect the same to apply there. For example, there is a 
>>> 2D buildings map for Calgary that seems to be complete:
>>>
>>> https://data.calgary.ca/Base-Maps/2D-Buildings-Map/h98y-bpv6
>>>
>>> Here's a 3D LIDAR-derived map:
>>>
>>> https://mapgallery.calgary.ca/apps/bcd22e7089a440e792628ac61f35f4c1/explore 
>>>
>>>
>>> In short, the public data appear to be available. Why aren't they in 
>>> OSM? Is this a licence problem?
>>>
>>> Kind regards
>>>
>>> Stephen Bosch
>>>
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>
>
>
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